Incorporating Coherent Terrain Types into Story-Driven Procedural Maps

We present a system for procedurally generating a map for a story-driven game, where locations in the map are assigned algorithmically or by designer preference. In addition, we also generate terrain, together with climate to match the terrain, with smooth, coherent transitions between terrain exhibiting different weather. We summarize weather approximations using a tuple to represent conditions such as temperature and humidity. We then exploit our previous work in map construction by placing locations of interest in the story on the map and then build a terrain boundary map that determines the boundaries between ranges of tuple values that belong to specific terrain types. We complete our construction by combining the climate map with a terrain type lookup, producing a final map with cohesive terrains. We describe the implementation of our system and illustrate the construction with some procedurally generated maps, including the procedural generation of the Narshe/Figaro area from Final Fantasy VI.